Zoe Dubno Refuses to Square the Circle

On my way to meet author Zoe Dubno at a French restaurant, which I won’t name because she frequents it as her unofficial office, I was late. I was late by 15 minutes, exactly, because the A train was stuck behind the C and running local instead of express. Before that, I was stuck on a completely elective call about belts with two self-proclaimed Marxists in fashion, the kind of Devil Wears Prada types who both critique and create the material conditions that bind us. Apt, I thought, thinking about the Marxist fashion editor who appears in Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness & Love (Scribner). The jokes, as they say, write themselves.

Happiness & Love isn’t an indictment of her scene, nor a love letter to it, two phrases typically hung like millstones around the necks of young women writers. Instead, it functions as something riskier: a Bernhardian truth-telling, or as Dubno herself has said, her Woodcutters. The novel orbits a nameless narrator who moves through a Dimes Square–adjacent milieu, mourning the loss of a central figure while oscillating between disgust and delight in the excesses around her. To read Happiness & Love is to feel the uncomfortable recognition of contradiction. If you feel skewered, it’s probably because you are. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Dubno insists the book is not really about the scene people want to pin it to. Still, it’s hard not to read its pages and map them onto familiar personalities. “All scenes are pathetic,” she told me. “By nature, they’re just people feeding off each other while kind of hating each other.” She cited Seth Price, who wrote that the only way to be beloved by a scene is to remain outside of it.

What makes Happiness & Love startling isn’t whether its characters resemble anyone we know. It’s the way contradiction saturates both their lives and the prose itself. The novel lives in the contradiction of wanting glamour but gagging on its aftertaste, of caring desperately about not caring. Her Marxist fashion editor becomes the book’s most potent emblem of this: the person who reads Das Kapital by day, obsesses over Prada pleats by night, and must perform elaborate mental gymnastics to square the circle.

Dubno is generous to this character, as she is to all. “I feel a lot of compassion for the Marxist fashion editor,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to admit: this is a contradiction. Marx himself talks about the price of wool for a coat. Fashion and politics, there’s no neat way to reconcile them.” We all do this, and pretend to be uncomfortable about the contradiction through its unavoidability. What if, Dubno proposes, we could accept the inner monologue as part and parcel of accepting life’s many two-sided coins?

Of course, every debut novel written in the first person invites the same suspicion: Is this you? Dubno resists that conflation. “I wasn’t writing about any one person,” she explained, noting how people across her post-launch travels in Italy, LA, and New York all read their own cities, friends, and scenes into the book.

Yet the porousness between narrator and author remains. Like her protagonist, Dubno grew up on the Upper West Side, cycled through Ridgewood, decamped to London, and returned to a changed city. “When I came back, I thought, ‘Oh, this is ruined,’” she said, recalling how the neighborhood once defined by easy collisions of friends at pre-fab Clandestino and Dimes (restaurant: proper) had become a tourist spectacle.

Still, she insists her narrator isn’t simply a mouthpiece. “[Happiness & Love] is more about mourning than love or hate,” she told me. “There are contradictions you can live with, and contradictions you can’t. At some point, you realize the stakes are your soul, your well-being.”

That refusal to land firmly on satire or adoration is a refusal to resolve that which must be held in opposition to itself. This is the novel’s most powerful engine.

Press cycles inevitably shoehorn women writers into familiar archetypes: the “literary it-girl,” the “debut sensation.” Dubno, wary of those pigeonholes, reaches instead toward a lineage of women writing against categorization. She spoke at length about Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, nodding when I threw the unapologetic carnality of Mary Gaitskill into the mix of women who traditionally did whatever the fuck they wanted. “De Beauvoir manages to say: I can be horny and a writer and a woman. Fine. Done. That was important to me,” she said.

She also reads across the masculine avant-garde. Thomas Bernhard is a crucial touchstone, as is Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a novel that takes place entirely on an escalator ride, she told me, but expands into cosmic interiority. Dubno animated when talking about these writers not because she wants to inherit their mantles, but because they prove that nothing much has to “happen” for everything to happen. Her own novel takes place at a funeral dinner party, after all.

When asked what she recommends beyond her literary canon, her recs veered toward the everyday and oddly practical. Yoga, specifically Ashtanga, which she’s practiced for years. Madonna’s “Ashtangi,” a track she cites with the same conviction she references Bernhard. And, more simply, clothes: I asked if her white snap cardigan is Agnès B., having just bought one myself. “They’re useful. Even if popular. Just useful,” she said, tugging at the collar.

The novel began as a dare of sorts. While completing her MFA at Rutgers, where she was funded, insured, and teaching, Dubno’s advisor John Keene joked she should write her own Woodcutters. The idea stuck. “What kind of novel can I write in six months?” she asked herself. The answer: one that poured out in a near-monologue, blisteringly funny and alive with contradictions.

She wrote it cackling to herself, thinking not of reviewers but of friends who would text her back laughing. “The fun part was writing,” she said. “Not reception. If you write for the reaction, you can’t sustain it. Writing has to entertain you first."

Writing about Dubno, I realized quickly that my questions for our interview were misplaced. To ask them would be to search for resolution, for neat closure, where her work resists exactly that impulse. Like her narrator, Dubno inhabits the city’s contradictions without trying to dissolve them.

To hate something and do it anyway. To love glamour but gag on it. To critique Marxist fashion editors while understanding their plight. To write a book that is neither indictment nor love letter but something else, an acceptance. “There are choices you make,” she said, “but the contradictions don’t go away. You just live with them.”

As her title suggests, Zoe Dubno wishes you all happiness and love. And all the contradictions that come with.